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User talk:Jlgderivera
*Hi Jlgderivera. I found ecpathy a really interesting concept. Can you add more tot his article? Do you have more references. Can it be trained? and how can it be used in clinical work? Dr Joe Kiff 10:25, February 13, 2010 (UTC) :Hi Luis. If you want to develop your article in Spanish I have set up an interlanguage link off the Ecpathy article. In the long run I would like to see the wiki developed for all the main language communities. If you can add more to the English version that would be important to. Is this mainly an idea you have developed in the context of psychotherapists managing their internal world, in order to maintain their availability to their clients? If so I think this is a very important area and it would be good to draw together the literature that has addressed this. Dr Joe Kiff 10:09, February 14, 2010 (UTC) Dear Joe, thank you for your comments and editing. Prior to writing any thing serious, I will tell you how I first developed Ecpathy, as a clinical tool to help one of my patients. She was doing fine in therapy, but she complained of feeling suicidal every time she visited her mother. I interviewed the mother myself, a fine woman, but I ended the interview feeling frustrated and irritated. I think she was a master on using projective identification, a difficult-to-deal-with defense, which she probably applied to all her relationships. As other patients and therapists-in- training have reported to me similar occurrences, I set myself to investigate further on the matter. To understand the dynamics of induced feelings, the previous step has to be a good understanding of the dynamics of own produced feelings. My colleague and distant relative Joseph de Rivera suggests that a feeling is an opinion on the circumstances that aroused it, so anger is the opinion that one has to eliminate something or someone that blocks our way, fear is the opinion that something terrible is about to happen, and so on. Following this lead, I developed a ''logic of feelings, ''or method of following the tread of feelings associations, with complete disregard for any cognitive understanding. Training on meditation is helpful to do this, which is akin to being aware of the own feelings as they happen. Acceptance of feelings and curiosity about their unfolding are the basic attitudes required. From there, the next step is to differentiate between the feelings created by oneself, that is, related to the own circumstances, and those induced by others, as it happens in sympathy or in the identification or sharing of somebody else experiences. Ecpathy follows naturally, as the adscription of each feeling to its source, either to oneself or to other with whom one is identifying. Empathy is, precisely, the reverse, identifying with someone and thus been able to feel what he must be feeling. In normal situations, ecpathy is automatic. When it is not, one has to apply a concious procedure, which follows three steps: 1) being aware of the feelings created by oneself 2) being aware of the feelings induced by other (created by oneself through identification with other) 3) ascribing each feeling to its source. I think the whole thing can be conceptualized as a sophisticated way of dealing with difficult countertransference. But it can be teached to patients to help them to deal with toxic relationships. :Dear Luis. This is as interesting as I hoped. I like the idea of an active process of disengaging from others in normal social life, to complement the engagement in the notion of empathy, but is less clinical than ideas of splitting and schizoid behavior etc. I like too, how this can be used both conciously and unconciously by therapists to mediate countertransference reactions and how it can lead to explicit methods for managing difficult material for therapists and difficult relationships for clients. So do you feel you can expand the article? I would be particularly interested in how the ideas fit into psychoanalytic theory and how the techniques you describe for processing the thoughts and feelings fit with cognitive approaches. Dr Joe Kiff 23:59, February 14, 2010 (UTC) OK. It may take a few days, though. Best regards Luis de Rivera